Author of the project here.

I want to clarify why this project exists (as many seem to point out that other projects or methods exist for doing this).

TL;DR; If you think of localtunnel as just a shitty ngrok (or name your project here), you are missing the point and probably don't have the same use cases I do.

1. It was made overnight at some hackathon because I was not satisfied with the other tunneling options I found. They required either an account or some stupid ssh setup. I got to thinking of ways to create a tunnel that simply had an CLI tool and instantly get a tunnel no setup. It worked, I kept it.

2. It is written as a library first, CLI tool second. This means it can be used to create tunnels in a test suite if you want to use services like saucelabs to run browser tests (see https://github.com/defunctzombie/zuul). This is leveraged by projects like socket.io and engine.io (among others). This is perhaps the main reason I keep it around despite there being alternative CLI tools.

3. Both the client and server code are availably and easy to install and use. Companies do this when they want to run their own tunnels for privacy (or whatever their reasons... I don't care).

4. Yes, I know the name is identical to the old ruby?python? one. Whatever. That one seems defunct now anyway.

I'm confused, there is an existing project called localtunnel that does exactly the same thing and dominates search results for "localtunnel". At the very least, pick a different name.

http://progrium.com/localtunnel/

You can also use ngrok.com which has been around for quite a while. The developer even responds very quickly to support requests.

As a bonus, you also get:

- Custom (sub) domains

- TLS tunnels if you want, not mandatory

- Other protocols than just HTTP/S

This seems like a bad idea. localtunnel.me is redirecting non-tunnel'd subdomains to its main page, while inactive tunnel'd subdomains return "localtunnel error: no active client for 'adbc'". So, with a little poking, you find that tunnel'd subdomains seem to be [a-z0-9]{4}.localtunnel.me ... which isn't too terribly large of a search space to crawl. If it gets popular, it should be easy to find works-in-progress that might give up access to the user's computer, or keys to prod, or any of the other stuff that people are a little sloppy about on their work machines.

edit: I was wrong, I should've been a little more thorough. Looks like it's [a-z0-9]{4,10}.localtunnel.me, which is significantly larger.

I suggest you don't use it until they have upgraded OpenSSL...

WARNING: server returned more data than it should - server is vulnerable! (Heartbleed)

Oh nice! This looks very similar to https://pagekite.net (which is also open source), minus the need for an account. Good call.

Also: Vagrant has added a "vagrant share" command that publishes access to your vagrant box, which should be safer than publishing access to your full machine.

http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/share/

Personally I would rather just use "ssh -R", the built in remote port forwarding. You either need to flip a setting on the server to allow listening on an interface besides localhost, or configure Nginx/etc as a reverse proxy.

For example:

ssh -f -N -q -R 2222:localhost:22 my_name@remote.example.com

Decent writeup here:

http://www.noah.org/wiki/SSH_tunnel

Isn’t the node.js version of the ruby one ? ie: http://progrium.com/localtunnel/

Or the Go version: https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok

This seems like a bad idea or to phrase it correctly: use it wisely.

Because, you will use this service for the development to give someone outside access to something. If you then close the tunnel, the service will forward any request to its own server either to the main pager or to an error page. That means, all data given with a request, either via GET or via POST, will be given to that service. That could include sensitive data. That means, this kind of service is security risk.

If you have a VPS, why not set up a subdomain to proxy localhost connections forwarded through SSH? (e.g., $ ssh -R 8000:localhost:80)

I'm sure I'm missing some obvious disadvantage…

Wow. Exactly the same as ngrok, just .. worse.

There's also http://httpi.pe/ - pretty similar both in concept and in implementation. The major difference would be an 'inspection' view allowing users to view the traffic going through the tunnel.

(Shameless plug - I'm the author of httpipe)

shameless plug: I created http://ultrahook.com which does similar but with a focussed goal of receiving webhooks on localhost.

This is awesome and only an hour a go I needed this. Perfect! :)

It would be nice to have option to allow custom URL

Nice!! so easy to setup and use.. awesome work

This is pretty neat!